His universality is displayed with equal strength in the influence which he exerts over all classes of minds. He has never been raised to a factitious eminence by the applauses of a clique. His fame is as natural and as healthy as his character, owing none of its lustre to the gloss of flattery, or the glare of fashion. His themes have been taken, to a great extent from common life. He has derived the coloring of his pictures from the universal sentiments of humanity. He is equally free from cold, prosaic, common-place hardness of feeling and from sickly and mawkish effeminacy. He loves to deal with matters of fact, but always surrounds them with the light of his radiant imagination. He exalts and glorifies the actual, without losing it in the clouds of a vaporous ideal. Refined and fastidious in feeling, he retains his sympathy with the most homely realities of life, chuckles over the luscious comforts of a Dutch ménage, and professes no philosophical indifference to the savor of smoking venison in an Indian lodge. With the curious felicity of his style, he uses no strange and far-fetched words. Its charm depends on the beauty of its combinations, not on the rarity of its language. He employs terms that are in the mouths of the people, but weaves them up into those expressive and picturesque forms that never cease to haunt the memory of the reader. Accordingly, he is cherished with equal delight by persons of every variety of culture. His fascinating volumes always formed a part of the traveling equipage of one of the most celebrated New-England judges, and they may be found with no less certainty among the household goods of the emigrant, and the resources for a rainy day on the frugal shelves of the Yankee farmer. They still detain the old man from his pillow, and the schoolboy from his studies. Under their potent charm, the merchant forgets his Wall-street engagements; the preacher lingers over their seductive sentences till the Sunday becomes an astonishment; the statesman is beguiled into oblivion of the salvation of his country; and the advocate is absorbed in the fortunes of some "roystering varlet," till his own forlorn client loses all chance of recovering his character.